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Sucrose Development

Sucrose 0.85.x is an unstable development series intended for testing and development purposes. Sucrose uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status, so this unstable 0.85.x series will eventually become the 0.86 stable release.

Schedule

Date Task Notes
2009 Jun 05 Release goals proposal
Jun 12 New modules proposal
Jun 25 Sucrose 0.85.1 Tarballs Due
Jun 26 Sucrose 0.85.1 Development Release
Jul 23 Sucrose 0.85.2 Tarballs Due
Jul 24 Sucrose 0.85.2 Development Release
Aug 20 Sucrose 0.85.3 Tarballs Due
Aug 21 Sucrose 0.85 Alpha (0.85.3) Feature and API Freeze, String Cooling*
Aug 27 Sucrose 0.85.4 Tarballs Due
Aug 28 Sucrose 0.85.4
Sep 03 Sucrose 0.85.5 Tarballs Due
Sep 04 Sucrose 0.85.5 Beta (0.85.5) String Freeze**
Sep 10 Sucrose 0.85.6 Tarballs Due
Sep 11 Sucrose 0.85.6
Sep 17 Sucrose 0.86 Tarballs Due Hard code freeze
Sep 18 Sucrose 0.86 Final Release!

* String changes have to be announced, but no exceptions have to be requested.

** Every string change has to be requested and to be approved.

Glucose Development Team/Release/Modules

Fructose Development Team/Release/Modules

Glucose Dependencies

Fructose Dependencies

  • pyabiword
  • hulahop

Proposal Goals

Switch to a standard WM

Switch to a standard compliant window manager (possibly Metacity)

  • better non-sugarized activity support
  • our current version of matchbox is unmaintained
  • #602
  • goal: test patch in a custom Soas image
  • Owner: Sayamindu

New toolbar widget

  • add new widget and switch basic activities to it
  • keep the old widget if some of the activities do not change in this cycle
  • Eben's mockups
  • Ticket #452
  • Owner: Marco/Benzea?

Browse

  • tabs support (open popup windows in tabs, saving of tabs history, standard behavior of Browse should not change -> no open tab by default)
  • better naming of files to be uploaded (change temp name to something based on the title)
  • export for offline viewing (Web page - HTML only, Web page - Complete)
  • creating of web pages (highlighting support in Write, Activity with special HTML based features(can happen outside of the official cycle))
  • bookmarks (global bookmarks, at the moment we only have session bookmarks and the autocompletion functionality)
  • fix theme (scroll-bars #805, html form widgets - Gary)
  • Owner: Simon

Tags in the Journal

  • auto completion for already existing tags, tag clouds
    • its implemented in Library activity as well
  • Owner: ?

More Accelerators (short cuts)

Printing support

Search in home view

  • the search is recently builds disabled
  • Owner: ?

Collaboration

  • Scalable presence service - Integrate gadget in the Sugar UI #7711
  • Make collaboration more stable
  • Owner: ?

Flash activities

  • using the sugar gnash widget - a blog post from Tomeu has some more info
  • SWFEdit from Tomeu is in gitorious, I plan to make a couple of sample Flash based activities with it.
  • Owner: Gary?

Groups

  • tagging buddies to build up relations, tagging can happen by a teacher tagging a class or the learner can tag himself
  • Owner: Kartig Rustagi
  • Proposal

List views

  • in the mesh view a list view of the access points
  • switching to use gtk-tree-view for the lists (journal, activity) - this has accessibility support already
  • Owner: ?

Mesh View

  • use buddy color to seed the position to get a more stable positioning in the mesh view
  • See ticket #318
  • Owner: ?

Ad-hoc networking

  • as an alternative to the mesh
  • Owner: ?

Bindings

  • Moving Sugar to PyBank to save memory and improve startup speed. Pybank builds the bindings as you need them, so you don't import all the bindings for gtk at startup of every process.
  • Vala bindings for the toolkit
    • (?) we could write #Decoupling of Sucrose/bridge level on vala i.e. use for core only dbus API and provide bride level in vala binding Alsroot 06:15, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Owner: Tomeu

Keyboard control panel extension

  • (Sayamindu would prefer to keep it as a separate module, since everyone may not choose to go with XKB)
  • Owner: Sayamindu

Dictionary support in the shell

CP - Language in native language

  • link to ticket here
  • Owner: Sayamindu

TA

  • de-couple the portfolio from the base TA
  • Owner: Walter

Library activity

  • Library Activity Proposal
  • in honey
  • maybe we want a pluggable Views(Home/Journal) to ease the use of such kinds of activities(activities that can browse sugar objects)
    • another option - add autostart activities
  • Owner: Alsroot

API work

  • backwards compability
  • (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/sugar-port will take care for the activities needs for a working activity on 0.82 for example) see "Decoupling of Sucrose" section Alsroot 16:16, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • (?) start moving to pure dbus interface for glucose
    • dbus method to resume/open activities(instead of sugar-toolkit API)
      • something simple like dbus_object.activate(uid) or
    • etc.
  • Owner: ?

Decoupling of Sucrose

The major idea is to have tough core(with stable release cycle) <=> dbus-API/sugar-toolkit-API(in ideal only dbus) <=> unlimited count of activities that uses core functionality and do not follow 6 months release cycle(which could be overmuch for activity).

It could looks like:

  • core - glucose, six months(or so) release cycle, w/o any activities, only API
    • in ideal, it should have only dbus API
  • bridge - sugar-port for example, between all(in ideal) already deployed sugars and activities i.e. it provides backwards compatibility(so the same activity code will work on all sugars) and at the same time provides features from newest sugar(so the same activity code will use last sugar's features)
    • we could write this level in vala to provide core functionality for wide range of programming languages
  • world - the rest of sugar world i.e. fructose/honey (but now there are no differences between them) that use core directly, if all deployed sugars have the same API for desired functionality(for example in case of preselected mime type, ObjectsChooser has different API for 0.82-0.86), or use bridge otherwise.
    imho another point to have activities outside of core release cycle - activities have more shorter release cycle then core has

And of course deployers can form any sets from these components

    Core                       Bridge                         World         
+------------+                                            +------------+
| Sugar-0.82 |---+                                    +---| Activity A |
+------------+   |    +---------------------------+   |   +------------+
+------------+   |    | sugar-port                |   |   +------------+
|     ...    |--dbus--| do not fail on 0.82       |---+---|    ...     |
+------------+   |    | but uses all 777 features |   |   +------------+
+------------+   |    +---------------------------+   |   +------------+
| Sugar-777  |---+                                    +---| Activity Z |
+------------+                                            +------------+
  • Owner: ?

Version support for datastore

See Version_support_for_datastore/Proposal.

  • Owner: Silbe

Datastore features that could benefit Library

These features can benefit Activities/Library activity. At present(for 0.82/0.84) Library uses "rich" datastore client which fetches all Journal objects to make short list of objects(by collapsing all versions to one item), moreover it has to unzip .xo bundles to get bundle_id value. So its not good.

With all these features implemented Library can use "thin" datastore client and not fetch all objects, just make proper request for datasotre.find() to get sorted and collapsed objects by portions (by using offset/limit find() arguments).

Get collapsed find()'s resultset Let user call datastore.find() to get list of collapsed objects(all versions by one item).

That should mean that any datastore object should have "object id":

  • activity_id for objects that were generated by activities (already implemented)
  • bundle_id for .xo bundles in the Journal
  • uid for other objecets (already implemented)

History of collapsed object Let datastore clients browse history of collapsed objects:

  • for activity_id objects - sort by timestamp (already impelemented)
  • for bundle_id objects - sort by activity_version(or so) field

Sort find()'s resultset Let datastore clients sort objects by any field(not only predefined like uid, activity_id etc).

Sort by buddies count

  • Owner: ?

Security

Add support for the current version of Rainbow so

  1. security flaws in Browse (which are the norm rather than the exception) don't allow an attacker to take over the machine and
  2. programming mistakes cannot affect other activities (like deleting all Journal contents).
  • Owner: ?

Testing

Add some automated testing to catch bugs earlier and ease integration work:

  • SugarBot (activity-level testing)
  • some system-level tests (e.g. verify datastore works correctly)
  • regression tests
  • Owner: ?

Activities updates

Let users update theirs activities.

There could be several options:

  • Use XO's mechanism to have update item in control panel(pretty common choice)
    • we will have specific option - update only activities
  • Follow Unified Objects paradigm, one of implementation of this idea is Activities/Library, so give user more freedom in upgrading procedure(i.e. w/o ceilings) - incorporate updating procedure into browsing tool(like Journal, Library), so users get one unified method to browse and update(sync) theirs objects(not only activities).

Owner: ?

Old items

Proposed modules

nothing proposed yet